I know the developer is strapped for cash, but I have a hard time seeing how giving $20 out of each unit sold to MS to repay the loan is going to fill their coffers. Im sure the game will be popular and all, but I dont think Interplay is getting the great deal they think they are.
Well, it's easy to imagine them saying, "Look, we're betting our company's fortunes on this movie tie-in, but we don't have the money to survive until the profits start to roll it. So lets borrow the cash from Microsoft. If the game flops, we're screwed no matter how you cut it, and Microsoft can get in line with our other creditors. If the game does well, we can pay off our loan to Microsoft, stay independent, and still make non-net versions for other consoles 6 months later."
The Nintendo platform had already been out. Microsoft is buying out game companies to make games for the so far non-existant X-Box. They are using every dollar they can to strongarm their way into the console game market.
So it is OK for a company to use its capital to tie up a valuable movie license to promote its system after that system is released, but not when that system is just a few months away from release?
Thalidomide was perfectly safe, no? What possible side-effects could a drug to counteract the effects of motion-sickness have?
Just about any kind of biological harm imaginable. People knew, even back then, that you can never know for sure if a drug is perfectly safe. They've gotten more rigorous about testing drugs, but still, everytime you take a new drug, you run the risk that it has some horrible side effect that nobody thought to check for, or that was simply too rare to show up before they started dosing the general population with the stuff. Drugs are hard to predict, because you are typically exposing your entire body to it, and all a drug needs to do to produce a harmful side effect is stick to the wrong molecule in your body--and there are a *lot* of molecules in your body.
Fortunately, light is much simpler. For one thing, you are only exposing one small part of your body to it--and that is a part that is *designed* to deal with light. Light is very simple; no complex molecular structure like a drug, just photons. The hazards of light are well understood. The major one is intensity, and that can be easily dealt with simply by designing a component that is incapable of putting out enough power to do damage. Might as well worry that your TV is suddenly going to get real bright and burn out your eyes. The only other real concern is seizures from the flicker, and that's nothing new--if it makes you seize, don't look at it.
I disagree, that's not going to stop three 200lb thugs from cornering in the school bathroom. Use all the Judo you want. I put my money on the thugs.
As the smallest kid in my class, who was in this situation more than once, I can tell you that judo works pretty well even on 200 lb thugs. No, I didn't win every conflict--but neither did I ever feel helpless. And a surprising number of bullies don't want to take the chance of being made to look stupid by a little kid. With most of them, it only took once--they might call me names from afar, but they never got within arm's reach again.
No, this won't work. I do like the non-violent nature of Judo, but answering violence with violence is NOT the answer.
I can tell you that I did it, and it worked. So far as I know it is the *only* thing that works. And I hardly ever had to really hurt anybody--just threw them down on their backs and knocked the wind out of them, and held them down so they couldn't get up.
Reduce class size, pay teachers more. That's the answer! Harassment and violence in the classroom must be taken seriously.
A dead giveaway that you've never had to deal with this situation. I almost never had any kind of problem in the classroom. Bullies may be stupid, but they aren't *that* stupid. The worst problems happened before and after school, off of school grounds. What are you going to do, assign each student a personal bodyguard? In my experience, it *always* made the situation worse when well-meaning school officials tried to help. Perhaps they can identify the bullies and give them counseling, but there will invariably be some who don't respond, and it only takes one or two bullies to make a kid's life miserable.
It's important to be clear about one things: On the average, youth violence has been decreasing, not increasing, as videogames and movies have gotten increasingly violent. So any either violent entertainment does not promote violence among young people in general, or if it does, any such effect is so small compared to larger social factors that it cannot be detected. Statistically speaking, school shootings are insignificant--they make headlines precisely because they are unusual, but they have no real impact on the overall risk of violence.
Fine, but why are we having a run of school shootings now? Pointing out that it goes against an overall trend simply makes the observation more odd. One politically fashionable explanation can be eliminated out of hand, at least as causative (as opposed to enabling) factors. It's obviously not the availability of guns. There probably never has been a time when a sufficiently motivated kid in the US could not get his hands on guns. And in many parts of the country, teenagers hunt--and you can bet they know how to shoot. Yet the shootings are a recent phenomenon. Obviously, if there were no guns, then there would be no shootings, but guns are not the immediate cause.
The same goes for bullying. It may be a motivation, but it is nothing new. As many readers of slashdot can attest, "odd" kids have always taken a lot of crap in school.
What is new? Simply the idea. Once somebody has actually done something, it becomes that much easier for others to do likewise. Thanks to media hysteria, the idea of getting a gun and blowing away his tormentors is now in the forefront of every bullied kid's mind, while every kid who feels ignored and insignificant is paying close attention to the media attention showered upon the perpetrators of the school shootings. Unfortunately, this means that, unless the news media develop a sense of ethics, and stop sensationalizing such events (which is probably even more unlikely than Americans embracing strict gun control), the shootings are going to continue. Indefinitely.
And in fact, it may even be that in one sense, videogames do contribute. It has been noted that depressed patients who start taking antidepressant drugs can be at risk of suicide. When you are really depressed, it is hard to take any action at all. But if you start to get petter, you may manage to find the will to actually do something about your plight--something final. Take a bullied kid, and give him a videogame system. After awhile, he starts to get pretty good at it, and his self-esteem rises to the point that when somebody picks on him, he thinks, "I'm not going to take this crap any more!" If there is anything constructive about these shootings, it is raising public perception of the problem of bullying. But while schools could be more responsive to the problem of bullies, I doubt if they'll be able to stop them altogether--there simply isn't the manpower to monitor the student body that closely. Even when I was a kid, the bullies often didn't attack you in school...they laid in wait to get you afterwards.
Here's my proposed solution: identify the bullied kids, and enroll them in a judo class. They'll build their self esteem, and when somebody picks on them, they'll be able to deal with it without going home for Daddy's gun. Judo's a sport--it's (mostly) nonlethal, but a geeky kid with a yellow belt is more than a match for the average bully. Hey, it worked for me....
I think that what ultimately killed the Dreamcast was Sega's willingness to allow its software development teams great latitude for creativity. The problem was that, like many creative people, they were not particularly interested in rehashing their old work--they wanted to push the envelope.
For example, Sega had an old RPG series, Phantasy Star, that was extraordinarily popular. And when Sega released the Dreamcast, they announced plans for a new RPG in which players would be able to visit virtually any place in an entire city, and interact with numerous nonplayer characters as they go independently through their daily lives. Now the smart thing to do would have been to tie these innovations to a familiar concept, like Phantasy Star, but instead, they decided to do an entirely new type of RPG--a modern-day kung-fu RPG. They invested a huge amount of money into the project, and while it received a fair amount of critical praise, it was never the system-seller Sega had hoped for. What was really needed was for a manager to say, "Kung Fu RPG? Great idea! Tell you what--do a sequel to Phantasy Star, try out some of the concepts in a series that our customers already know and like, and if it's a big success, you can do the Kung Fu game next." Eventually, Sega got around to doing a Phantasy Star game--as an online title, no less--but too late to save the DC.
Similarly, Sega let one of their top developers spend his time creating an incredibly realistic Ferrari racing sequel--so accurate that most players found the cars too difficult to handle. Again, what was badly needed was a manager willing to say, "Good idea, but let's put it on the back burner until we have new Dreamcast games in the Nights, Virtua Fighter, Panzer Dragoon, and Daytona series."
Creativity and willingness to take risks has always been Sega's strong point. But what we saw with the Dreamcast (and the Saturn before it) was a company that was unable to compromise its ideals, even when its back was to the wall.
I don't know about you but I lose a little respect for people that insult their audience. I guess we're all stupid enough to give him our money but not smart enough to understand that it's fiction?
You know, there is a big difference between saying that we are all not smart enough to understand that its fiction, and saying that there is somebody who will misunderstand where the line between reality and fiction lies in a novel that was deliberately constructed to obscure that line.
Let us remember what so many in the scientific establishment attempt to deny: evolution is nothing but a theory.
This is true, but only in the same sense that one can say that gravity is "nothing but a theory." Fundamentally, all scientific explanation and generalization is theory. You can observe things falling as many times as you like, but when you generalize that to a universal force that affects all matter, you are engaging in theory.
It is always a good idea to beware of any phrase that includes the words "nothing but," as this is almost always a sign that somebody is trying to pull a rhetorical fast one on you. Since all explanation is theory, the complaint basically boils down to: "That explanation is nothing but an explanation!"
Theory does not imply uncertainty, other than in the strict philosophical sense in which it is impossible to know anything about the outside world (including that it exists) with absolute certainty. Some theories are very speculative. Others, such as gravity and evolution, have been so extensively confirmed that they can reasonably be referred to as "facts."
This is a bit like announcing that the latest pictures of earth from space prove that the world is not flat. It's true, but it isn't going to change anybody's mind--because anybody who is still convinced that the world is flat in the face of already-overwhelming evidence has already built such an impregnable structure of rationalization that no additional piece of data, no matter how convincing, is going to sway him.
The biggest success of Creationism has been the creation of the illusion that there is serious scientific doubt about whether evolution occurred. Fortunately, the courts have been mostly successful in preventing them from teaching this lie to children.
I've lately been thinking that most geo-political games (Risk, Diplomacy, etc) are not very realistic, because the goal of world conquest is not only within reach, but it is nearly a guarantee that one-world government will be the final outcome.
During the cold war, two friends and I played a game of Risk. It was sufficiently evenly balanced that it quickly became clear that if any two players began a conflict, the third would inevitably win. So we just built our forces. After awhile, we ran out of game pieces, so we created makeshift game pieces of higher denomination. This went on for quite awhile, until one of us calculated how long it would take us to resolve the game if a conflict began, and we realized that we were all so well-armed that it would take hours of dice-rolling to wipe out anyone's forces. The prospect seemed horribly boring, so we declared peace and went outside to play.
In those frightening times, it was kind of an encouraging outcome--and not that bad a model of how things actually turned out.
Or to say it another way, I think there's quite a bit of significance in the commoditization of human beings.
Commoditization of human beings? As a society, we've been there, done that, fought the war. I don't think we'll fall into that trap again so easily. The notion that similar genes makes people less valuable is ridiculous, unless you are thinking about people as commodities to begin with. Is each of a pair of twins half as valuable as a singleton? Ask any parent of twins! A person cannot be duplicated, and cloning doesn't change that. Genes are just the starting point. You get a little more influence over what that starting point is, but that is just a somewhat refined version of what we already do when we choose a mate.
You're crossing very deeply programmed relational bonds when you do this. Every culture of humans on this planet has incest taboos. You would be putting your "daughter" in a role/relationship you formally reserved for your lover.
No, I'm not looking to replace my wife with a clone. That's not possible, because a person is as much a product as their upbringing as their personality, and besides, I'm not interested in a wife decades younger than I am. A clone of my wife would be my daughter, not my wife. Again, there is nothing particularly new about a father having to deal with a daughter who happens to look, and act, very much the way his wife did at that age--that's the way genetics often works. Most fathers manage to maintain an appropriate father/daughter relationship in spite of any such resemblance.
As to whether I would marry again, having a wife from a former marriage is always a potential difficulty in future relationships, but I don't see the exact percentage of her mother's genes as being a critical factor.
Dice games are what genetics is all about. I don't need to get into the whole argument here, but just remember that your wife might never have existed if her parents had opted for a clone instead of a little more genomic diversity.
Genetics isn't "about" anything, it just is. This is just the old, kneejerk "It ain't natural" reaction. And as I said before, we have more human genetic diversity than ever existed in history. And that will continue to be true even if we have quite a bit of cloning.
I'm going to hazard another guess and say that you adopted cloning without contemplating any of these issues.
On the contrary, I saw this coming decades ago, and have been contemplating the ethical implications for many years. And one lesson the history of technology teaches is that the problems people worry about in advance are rarely those that actually turn out to be the most troublesome. Cloning is a red herring--it sounds scary, but the issues involved are familiar ones that people have dealt with in one form or another for generations.
What's to get upset about? It's just a twist on in vitro fertilization, which people have been doing for a long time. I can see lots of reasons why people might want to do this (aside from the occasional case of narcissism).
I lost my wife before we had a chance to have children. It would be wonderful to have a daughter like her. She was a delightful person--the world could use another one like her (of course, that's assuming I could do as good a job of child-raising as her equally delightful parents). I am sure that there are parents who have lost children to accident or disease who feel the same way. Why roll the genetic dice again when you already had a winning throw?
The "unique identity" thing is a non-issue. After all, identical twins happen once in awhile, and they manage just fine. The fact that they are not genetically unique doesn't stop them from developing their own unique identities.
From a biological point of view, I suppose that we could get concerned about some kind of genetic monoculture. What if there is a fad for clones of some famous person, and everybody wants to have one? But clones are going to be a bit too costly for that to be an issue for quite a while. And face it, the one thing that we are *not* lacking on this globe is human genetic diversity. We can tolerate a lot of cloning while still having more genotypes in circulation than have ever before existed at one time.
I suppose there is the problem of the clone of the famous person growing up under the pressure of inflated expectations. Probably that clone of Einstein will decide to become a performance artist just to defy everybody's assumptions. But again, this isn't really any different from the problems faced every day by the sons and daughters of celebrities. It isn't easy, but they get by--occasionally, they even surpass their illustrious parents.
I think people are afraid of cloning, not because of any real threat of cloning itself, but because they perceive it as the leading edge of genetic modification, and that is indeed scary. At some point in the future, we are going to start changing our own genes. And the technology will soon be moving faster than our own generation time, which means that we will sooner or later introduce some sort of disastrous genetic "bug" that causes cancer, dementia, or worse, later in life. And it will be in a whole bunch of people before anybody realizes the problem. There will doubtless be tragedies to make thalidomide and diethylstilbesterol look like small potatoes. But it's not really cloning that is the leading edge--it is gene therapy. And that can't be stopped. Who is going to tell somebody that they aren't *allowed* to cure sickle cell? Or Huntington's Disease? But the concept of a genetic "disease" is unavoidably slippery. Once something becomes fixable, it automatically becomes a disease. Find a gene for perfect pitch? You've defined a "poor pitch perception" disease! Let's cure everybody!
I don't think it can be stopped. I don't even think it necessarily should be. Sometimes, you just have to weather the storm....
This article ignores one of the factors of the 1983 crash. Cheap home computers. Parents could buy a system that would let kids do their homework (that old salesman's story) and at the time had much better capabilities than the braindead 2600 (which was an ancient system by that time, true, but it was the king).
Actually, in 1983 you still could not buy a computer for anything close to the price of an Atari 2600. And computers of the day could not match the graphics of the contemporaneous Collecovision, which also suffered in the crash. Moreover, computer games also had a weak year in 1983.
The price gap between computers and consoles is as large as ever. Considering that a fast computer with an up-to-date graphics card is required for adequate performance on the latest games, you can expect to pay at least 3 times the price of a console. And the major advantages of consoles remain:
They (and their games) are designed to work well with consumer TVs. The average consumer would rather play games in his rec room than at his computer desk.
There are no configuration issues. If you have the target console, the game will work out of the box, period. You don't have to worry about whether you have enough RAM, MHz, the right version of the operating system, or the right video card.
Actually, home computer games had a very bad year in 1983. So did coin arcades. Although the popular myth is that too many bad Atari 2600 games killed the system, it seems more likely that 1983 simply marked the end of the videogame fad, with the backlash that always accompanies the end of a fad. Atari simply got the blame for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The current market lacks the two features that made 1983 such a disaster
1) Videogames are no longer a novelty; they are simply another entertainment medium.
2) There is not the unrealistic frenzy among developers, which led developers in the early 1980's to overextend themselves chasing the exponentially growing videogame market. When the fad ended, they had nothing to fall back upon.
That doesn't mean that there won't be a shake-out. There have been shakeouts in the past, and there will be in the future. The PS2 is probably in the weakest position, sandwiched between the DC, which is a bit more powerful, but has lots of strong games and and an up-and-running online gaming system, and the X-Box, which is expected to be both faster and easier to develop for. Unless Microsoft fumbles badly, the PS2 may have a rather short lifespan, especially since Sony was unable to meet demand this Xmas. Nintendo, of course, is always a wild card.
One of the few real gems among the mostly lackluster crew of PS2 games. It has the (nearly) mindless fighting of Double Dragon, but you can go anywhere, and you even need a bit of strategy to decide where to go to best help your army, because if your leader dies, you lose.
Can't blame people who want to share an underappreciated gem. Sega got a bad reputation when the Sega tanked, so a lot of people passed up the DC, which is now what the PS2 will probably be when developers figure out the thing really should be programmed.
The N64 certainly wasn't "technologically backwards." It was the first console to offer texture scaling in 3 dimensions and texture filtering. It was arguably too ambitious; the silicon cost so much that Nintendo couldn't afford to include a CD drive, which has been the major factor limiting its appeal to 3rd party developers.
Yes, conservation of momentum is the issue. If it actually violates conservation of momentum, that would be a big deal even if energy were absolutely conserved. But I wouldn't bet on it. It's very easy to come up with things that seem to violate conservation of momentum down here where there are things like friction. Which is why there is the concern that the thing would "just sit there and vibrate" if you were to put it out in free space.
No you are wrong. Unfortunately, I can't provide you with a link to the source, but I distinctly remember Sega announcing that the Dreamcast would be the last console that they will make.
No, Sega never made such an announcement, and indeed have begun work on their next console. The article you dimly remember was probably a media misinterpretation/mistranslation of a speech in which a Sega executive emphasized that Sega's focus would be on software and networking. The interpretation that Sega would not be continuing their hardware business was rebutted by Sega within a week of the original report.
The Reuters report, by the way, also seems to be a misunderstanding, and was rebutted immediately by Sega.
Perhaps the most impressive bit of misdirection is the way the media have managed to misrepresent themselves as liberal. By minimizing coverage of the real left (e.g. Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky), they help to create the illusion that the Republicans and Democrats define the extreme limits of political discourse, rather than being what they are: two parties that are both conservative enough to be acceptable to the large money interests that are critical for any kind of success in the American political process, and that differ mainly on issues of detail.
I think that developers are making progress in developing 3D games, but it's important to realize that when we compare classic 2D games to 3D games, we are comparing what is essentially a mature technology to one that is very new. The conventions of movement in a 2D world have been well worked out. For example, we accept almost without noticing the completely nonphysical convention of being able to alter the direction of a jump in mid leap. On the other hand, the ability to produce a moderately realistic, detailed world is very new, and designers have not had as much time and experience to figure out which conventions work and which don't.
Complicating that is the fact that 3D is inherently more difficult. In 2D, the degrees of freedom of your controller correspond very closely to the degrees of freedom of the visual world. 3D opens up vastly more degrees of freedom, not merely for movement, but for view. In 2D, the only real view problem was how to handle screen boundaries, and even that introduced difficulties, such as enemies attacking from just outside the boundaries of the screen. With 3D, there is not merely the issue of controlling your character, but also of controlling the point of view. Indeed, problems of camera control are the most common criticism of 3D games. Camera control has to balance the requirements of visual interest with those of character control, and do so dynamically in real time. Once again, there are a huge number of degrees of freedom to manage.
Of course, the other problem is that 3D is such a novelty that many games use 3D for its own sake, not because it is the best way to create a particular game. Very likely, some kinds of games simply call out for 2D play, regardless of whether the graphics are implemented with sprites or polygons. It may well be that 2D is the natural format for the platform game, for example.
However, the conclusion that can be drawn is that IF media violence encourages actual violence to any real extent (and of course, there is no evidence beyond popular prejudice that it does), that effect is too tiny to be apparent in the face of much more powerful social factors.
Instead of becoming a yapping maw for the left, I would suggest the author do a bit more research before adding to the already murky waters of disinformation.
You should do something about that twitch; your knee is jerking again. If you weren't so blinded by partisan politics, you would have realized that the author was criticising both the Republican and Democratic presidential and vice presidential candidates. Lieberman was the guy who ran the anti-videogame violence hearings, after all.
I think that most people are able to recognize this article for the reductio ad adsurbem that it is--i.e., if you are going to insist upon drawing a causal conclusion from the violence data, the causality relationship would go the opposite way.
From an educational point of view this is often a more effective approach. Try to explain the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc to the sort of people who draw such conclusions just seems to them like quibbling. But show them that their own reasoning leads to a conclusion that they don't want to accept can get them to actually question that reasoning.
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It's important to be clear about one things: On the average, youth violence has been decreasing, not increasing, as videogames and movies have gotten increasingly violent. So any either violent entertainment does not promote violence among young people in general, or if it does, any such effect is so small compared to larger social factors that it cannot be detected. Statistically speaking, school shootings are insignificant--they make headlines precisely because they are unusual, but they have no real impact on the overall risk of violence.
Fine, but why are we having a run of school shootings now? Pointing out that it goes against an overall trend simply makes the observation more odd. One politically fashionable explanation can be eliminated out of hand, at least as causative (as opposed to enabling) factors. It's obviously not the availability of guns. There probably never has been a time when a sufficiently motivated kid in the US could not get his hands on guns. And in many parts of the country, teenagers hunt--and you can bet they know how to shoot. Yet the shootings are a recent phenomenon. Obviously, if there were no guns, then there would be no shootings, but guns are not the immediate cause.
The same goes for bullying. It may be a motivation, but it is nothing new. As many readers of slashdot can attest, "odd" kids have always taken a lot of crap in school.
What is new? Simply the idea. Once somebody has actually done something, it becomes that much easier for others to do likewise. Thanks to media hysteria, the idea of getting a gun and blowing away his tormentors is now in the forefront of every bullied kid's mind, while every kid who feels ignored and insignificant is paying close attention to the media attention showered upon the perpetrators of the school shootings. Unfortunately, this means that, unless the news media develop a sense of ethics, and stop sensationalizing such events (which is probably even more unlikely than Americans embracing strict gun control), the shootings are going to continue. Indefinitely.
And in fact, it may even be that in one sense, videogames do contribute. It has been noted that depressed patients who start taking antidepressant drugs can be at risk of suicide. When you are really depressed, it is hard to take any action at all. But if you start to get petter, you may manage to find the will to actually do something about your plight--something final. Take a bullied kid, and give him a videogame system. After awhile, he starts to get pretty good at it, and his self-esteem rises to the point that when somebody picks on him, he thinks, "I'm not going to take this crap any more!" If there is anything constructive about these shootings, it is raising public perception of the problem of bullying. But while schools could be more responsive to the problem of bullies, I doubt if they'll be able to stop them altogether--there simply isn't the manpower to monitor the student body that closely. Even when I was a kid, the bullies often didn't attack you in school...they laid in wait to get you afterwards.
Here's my proposed solution: identify the bullied kids, and enroll them in a judo class. They'll build their self esteem, and when somebody picks on them, they'll be able to deal with it without going home for Daddy's gun. Judo's a sport--it's (mostly) nonlethal, but a geeky kid with a yellow belt is more than a match for the average bully. Hey, it worked for me....
I think that what ultimately killed the Dreamcast was Sega's willingness to allow its software development teams great latitude for creativity. The problem was that, like many creative people, they were not particularly interested in rehashing their old work--they wanted to push the envelope.
For example, Sega had an old RPG series, Phantasy Star, that was extraordinarily popular. And when Sega released the Dreamcast, they announced plans for a new RPG in which players would be able to visit virtually any place in an entire city, and interact with numerous nonplayer characters as they go independently through their daily lives. Now the smart thing to do would have been to tie these innovations to a familiar concept, like Phantasy Star, but instead, they decided to do an entirely new type of RPG--a modern-day kung-fu RPG. They invested a huge amount of money into the project, and while it received a fair amount of critical praise, it was never the system-seller Sega had hoped for. What was really needed was for a manager to say, "Kung Fu RPG? Great idea! Tell you what--do a sequel to Phantasy Star, try out some of the concepts in a series that our customers already know and like, and if it's a big success, you can do the Kung Fu game next." Eventually, Sega got around to doing a Phantasy Star game--as an online title, no less--but too late to save the DC.
Similarly, Sega let one of their top developers spend his time creating an incredibly realistic Ferrari racing sequel--so accurate that most players found the cars too difficult to handle. Again, what was badly needed was a manager willing to say, "Good idea, but let's put it on the back burner until we have new Dreamcast games in the Nights, Virtua Fighter, Panzer Dragoon, and Daytona series."
Creativity and willingness to take risks has always been Sega's strong point. But what we saw with the Dreamcast (and the Saturn before it) was a company that was unable to compromise its ideals, even when its back was to the wall.
This is true, but only in the same sense that one can say that gravity is "nothing but a theory." Fundamentally, all scientific explanation and generalization is theory. You can observe things falling as many times as you like, but when you generalize that to a universal force that affects all matter, you are engaging in theory.
It is always a good idea to beware of any phrase that includes the words "nothing but," as this is almost always a sign that somebody is trying to pull a rhetorical fast one on you. Since all explanation is theory, the complaint basically boils down to: "That explanation is nothing but an explanation!"
Theory does not imply uncertainty, other than in the strict philosophical sense in which it is impossible to know anything about the outside world (including that it exists) with absolute certainty. Some theories are very speculative. Others, such as gravity and evolution, have been so extensively confirmed that they can reasonably be referred to as "facts."
This is a bit like announcing that the latest pictures of earth from space prove that the world is not flat. It's true, but it isn't going to change anybody's mind--because anybody who is still convinced that the world is flat in the face of already-overwhelming evidence has already built such an impregnable structure of rationalization that no additional piece of data, no matter how convincing, is going to sway him.
The biggest success of Creationism has been the creation of the illusion that there is serious scientific doubt about whether evolution occurred. Fortunately, the courts have been mostly successful in preventing them from teaching this lie to children.
In those frightening times, it was kind of an encouraging outcome--and not that bad a model of how things actually turned out.
No, I'm not looking to replace my wife with a clone. That's not possible, because a person is as much a product as their upbringing as their personality, and besides, I'm not interested in a wife decades younger than I am. A clone of my wife would be my daughter, not my wife. Again, there is nothing particularly new about a father having to deal with a daughter who happens to look, and act, very much the way his wife did at that age--that's the way genetics often works. Most fathers manage to maintain an appropriate father/daughter relationship in spite of any such resemblance.
As to whether I would marry again, having a wife from a former marriage is always a potential difficulty in future relationships, but I don't see the exact percentage of her mother's genes as being a critical factor.
Genetics isn't "about" anything, it just is. This is just the old, kneejerk "It ain't natural" reaction. And as I said before, we have more human genetic diversity than ever existed in history. And that will continue to be true even if we have quite a bit of cloning.
On the contrary, I saw this coming decades ago, and have been contemplating the ethical implications for many years. And one lesson the history of technology teaches is that the problems people worry about in advance are rarely those that actually turn out to be the most troublesome. Cloning is a red herring--it sounds scary, but the issues involved are familiar ones that people have dealt with in one form or another for generations.What's to get upset about? It's just a twist on in vitro fertilization, which people have been doing for a long time. I can see lots of reasons why people might want to do this (aside from the occasional case of narcissism).
I lost my wife before we had a chance to have children. It would be wonderful to have a daughter like her. She was a delightful person--the world could use another one like her (of course, that's assuming I could do as good a job of child-raising as her equally delightful parents). I am sure that there are parents who have lost children to accident or disease who feel the same way. Why roll the genetic dice again when you already had a winning throw?
The "unique identity" thing is a non-issue. After all, identical twins happen once in awhile, and they manage just fine. The fact that they are not genetically unique doesn't stop them from developing their own unique identities.
From a biological point of view, I suppose that we could get concerned about some kind of genetic monoculture. What if there is a fad for clones of some famous person, and everybody wants to have one? But clones are going to be a bit too costly for that to be an issue for quite a while. And face it, the one thing that we are *not* lacking on this globe is human genetic diversity. We can tolerate a lot of cloning while still having more genotypes in circulation than have ever before existed at one time.
I suppose there is the problem of the clone of the famous person growing up under the pressure of inflated expectations. Probably that clone of Einstein will decide to become a performance artist just to defy everybody's assumptions. But again, this isn't really any different from the problems faced every day by the sons and daughters of celebrities. It isn't easy, but they get by--occasionally, they even surpass their illustrious parents.
I think people are afraid of cloning, not because of any real threat of cloning itself, but because they perceive it as the leading edge of genetic modification, and that is indeed scary. At some point in the future, we are going to start changing our own genes. And the technology will soon be moving faster than our own generation time, which means that we will sooner or later introduce some sort of disastrous genetic "bug" that causes cancer, dementia, or worse, later in life. And it will be in a whole bunch of people before anybody realizes the problem. There will doubtless be tragedies to make thalidomide and diethylstilbesterol look like small potatoes. But it's not really cloning that is the leading edge--it is gene therapy. And that can't be stopped. Who is going to tell somebody that they aren't *allowed* to cure sickle cell? Or Huntington's Disease? But the concept of a genetic "disease" is unavoidably slippery. Once something becomes fixable, it automatically becomes a disease. Find a gene for perfect pitch? You've defined a "poor pitch perception" disease! Let's cure everybody!
I don't think it can be stopped. I don't even think it necessarily should be. Sometimes, you just have to weather the storm....
Actually, in 1983 you still could not buy a computer for anything close to the price of an Atari 2600. And computers of the day could not match the graphics of the contemporaneous Collecovision, which also suffered in the crash. Moreover, computer games also had a weak year in 1983.
The price gap between computers and consoles is as large as ever. Considering that a fast computer with an up-to-date graphics card is required for adequate performance on the latest games, you can expect to pay at least 3 times the price of a console. And the major advantages of consoles remain:
They (and their games) are designed to work well with consumer TVs. The average consumer would rather play games in his rec room than at his computer desk.
There are no configuration issues. If you have the target console, the game will work out of the box, period. You don't have to worry about whether you have enough RAM, MHz, the right version of the operating system, or the right video card.
Actually, home computer games had a very bad year in 1983. So did coin arcades. Although the popular myth is that too many bad Atari 2600 games killed the system, it seems more likely that 1983 simply marked the end of the videogame fad, with the backlash that always accompanies the end of a fad. Atari simply got the blame for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The current market lacks the two features that made 1983 such a disaster 1) Videogames are no longer a novelty; they are simply another entertainment medium. 2) There is not the unrealistic frenzy among developers, which led developers in the early 1980's to overextend themselves chasing the exponentially growing videogame market. When the fad ended, they had nothing to fall back upon. That doesn't mean that there won't be a shake-out. There have been shakeouts in the past, and there will be in the future. The PS2 is probably in the weakest position, sandwiched between the DC, which is a bit more powerful, but has lots of strong games and and an up-and-running online gaming system, and the X-Box, which is expected to be both faster and easier to develop for. Unless Microsoft fumbles badly, the PS2 may have a rather short lifespan, especially since Sony was unable to meet demand this Xmas. Nintendo, of course, is always a wild card.
One of the few real gems among the mostly lackluster crew of PS2 games. It has the (nearly) mindless fighting of Double Dragon, but you can go anywhere, and you even need a bit of strategy to decide where to go to best help your army, because if your leader dies, you lose.
Can't blame people who want to share an underappreciated gem. Sega got a bad reputation when the Sega tanked, so a lot of people passed up the DC, which is now what the PS2 will probably be when developers figure out the thing really should be programmed.
The N64 certainly wasn't "technologically backwards." It was the first console to offer texture scaling in 3 dimensions and texture filtering. It was arguably too ambitious; the silicon cost so much that Nintendo couldn't afford to include a CD drive, which has been the major factor limiting its appeal to 3rd party developers.
Yes, conservation of momentum is the issue. If it actually violates conservation of momentum, that would be a big deal even if energy were absolutely conserved. But I wouldn't bet on it. It's very easy to come up with things that seem to violate conservation of momentum down here where there are things like friction. Which is why there is the concern that the thing would "just sit there and vibrate" if you were to put it out in free space.
Perhaps the most impressive bit of misdirection is the way the media have managed to misrepresent themselves as liberal. By minimizing coverage of the real left (e.g. Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky), they help to create the illusion that the Republicans and Democrats define the extreme limits of political discourse, rather than being what they are: two parties that are both conservative enough to be acceptable to the large money interests that are critical for any kind of success in the American political process, and that differ mainly on issues of detail.
I think that developers are making progress in developing 3D games, but it's important to realize that when we compare classic 2D games to 3D games, we are comparing what is essentially a mature technology to one that is very new. The conventions of movement in a 2D world have been well worked out. For example, we accept almost without noticing the completely nonphysical convention of being able to alter the direction of a jump in mid leap. On the other hand, the ability to produce a moderately realistic, detailed world is very new, and designers have not had as much time and experience to figure out which conventions work and which don't.
Complicating that is the fact that 3D is inherently more difficult. In 2D, the degrees of freedom of your controller correspond very closely to the degrees of freedom of the visual world. 3D opens up vastly more degrees of freedom, not merely for movement, but for view. In 2D, the only real view problem was how to handle screen boundaries, and even that introduced difficulties, such as enemies attacking from just outside the boundaries of the screen. With 3D, there is not merely the issue of controlling your character, but also of controlling the point of view. Indeed, problems of camera control are the most common criticism of 3D games. Camera control has to balance the requirements of visual interest with those of character control, and do so dynamically in real time. Once again, there are a huge number of degrees of freedom to manage.
Of course, the other problem is that 3D is such a novelty that many games use 3D for its own sake, not because it is the best way to create a particular game. Very likely, some kinds of games simply call out for 2D play, regardless of whether the graphics are implemented with sprites or polygons. It may well be that 2D is the natural format for the platform game, for example.
However, the conclusion that can be drawn is that IF media violence encourages actual violence to any real extent (and of course, there is no evidence beyond popular prejudice that it does), that effect is too tiny to be apparent in the face of much more powerful social factors.
I think that most people are able to recognize this article for the reductio ad adsurbem that it is--i.e., if you are going to insist upon drawing a causal conclusion from the violence data, the causality relationship would go the opposite way. From an educational point of view this is often a more effective approach. Try to explain the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc to the sort of people who draw such conclusions just seems to them like quibbling. But show them that their own reasoning leads to a conclusion that they don't want to accept can get them to actually question that reasoning.